Former school bus driver pens book of wisdom

Barry Dorshimer found challenge and fulfillment behind the wheel

Barry Dorshimer, a retired bus driver in the Whitehall-Coplay School District,… (MONICA CABRERA, THE MORNING…)

May 01, 2012|Daniel Patrick Sheehan | In The Burbs

Barry Dorshimer worked for PPL for 37 years, four months, three days, 48 minutes and 16 seconds — this is his own good-humored estimate — and took an early retirement package that suited him financially but left him a little out of sorts because he isn't the kind to sit still.

So, on the grounds that he likes motor vehicles, and used to enjoy driving one of those Volkswagen hippie buses, he took a job as a school bus driver in the Whitehall-Coplay School District.

His family didn't think he could do it. The children would drive him mad, they said, or words to that effect. But he forged ahead and found out that driving a school bus was an absolutely marvelous job.

He drove elementary students, middle school students, high school students. He took after-school gigs, driving teams to games and bands to performances. He racked up as many as 70 stop-and-go miles a day.

"I miss it very much, " he told me the other day as we sat in the living room of his Northampton home and he reminisced about his days aboard Bus 75 — a vehicle he characterized as a 40-foot-long, 31,000-pound yellow limousine.

In 2007, after three years of driving, Dorshimer developed a retina problem that required several surgeries. It spelled the end of his school bus career, though during his convalescence he kept hoping he would see well enough again to return to driving.

He did something else during this idle time. He distilled the wisdom he had gleaned on the job and put it between the colorful covers of a 225-page book titled "School Bus Wisdom," which he self-published this year.

It's not as imposing as it sounds. The pages are only a sentence apiece, in large type. The advice ranges from practical — "Be ready to tie the shoelaces on little one's shoes" — to hair raising: "In the event the gas pedal becomes stuck wide open, shift to neutral and begin to brake…"

That last bit, happy to say, was not drawn from experience. Dorshimer was pondering the possibility of such a thing happening and asked a lot of other drivers what they would do. That was the best advice out of a series of responses that included "Pray."

The preponderance of advice in the book concerns safety — don't tailgate, mind your gauges, be well-rested — and sympathy. Dorshimer quickly learned that personal problems are often at the root of student misbehavior, so he encourages drivers to lend an ear to the kids and correct them quietly to avoid embarrassing them.

Not that any driver should be a pushover: "Problem students inherit seats up front. End of story," he advises.

Dorshimer told me a couple of stories that aren't in the book, about kids who struggled in one way or another.

"I had one girl, she was in middle school, who had tequila in a Sprite bottle and got absolutely delirious," he said. "She just wanted attention, apparently … The next day the other bus drivers stenciled my bus with 'Tequila Sunrise' and 'Tequila Party Bus.' "

He ran into the girl some time later and was happy to learn she had moved on from that troubled period in her life. Middle school is traumatic for almost everyone, he concluded.

"It's a tough age," he said. "But I found favor with them and they did with me, because I gave them respect. I looked at those kids like they were my grandkids."

That attitude pays dividends even now, said his wife, Janet.

"We run into kids these days and they come up to him and say 'You were the coolest bus driver,' " she said.

Dorshimer is marketing "School Bus Wisdom" through Facebook and a website and said he has received positive responses from drivers across the country. He thinks the book would make a nice prize in, say, bus company safety competitions.